MALEBRANCHE, NICOLAS. – Theologian, philosopher, and scientist; b. in Paris, 6 Aug. 1638; d. there, 13 Oct. 1715. In 1660 he entered the Oratory founded by Cardinal de Bérulle, patron of Descartes. In 1664, after ordination, his reading of Descartes’ *Traité de l’homme*, published at that time by Clerselier, turned him with philosophical passion toward the Cartesian system.
In 1674–75 he published the *Recherche de la vérité* in six volumes, his principal work (composed 1668–74; Latin trans. 1691; English trans. 1694; definitive ed. 1712). The theory of ideas contained in it provoked a long controversy, among others with Antoine Arnauld (cf. *Des vraies et des fausses idées*, 1683); the collection of Malebranche’s *Réponses* (1648–1704) appeared in 1709. In 1680 he published the *Traité de la nature et de la Grâce*, which Leibniz imitated; it met with adversaries in both Bossuet and Arnauld (1685), the latter obtaining its condemnation by the Index (1690). In 1683 he also published the *Méditations chrétiennes et métaphysiques* (2nd ed., 1699) and the *Traité de morale* (2nd ed., 1684; 3rd ed., 1697, praised in the *Traité de l’amour de Dieu*; 4th ed., 1704); in 1688 the *Entretiens sur la métaphysique et sur la religion* (2nd ed., 1692, with the *Entr. sur la mort*; 3rd ed., 1711); in 1708 the *Entretien d’un philosophe chrétien avec un philosophe chinois sur l’existence et la nature de Dieu*; and in 1715 the *Réflexions sur la prémonition physique*. In 1699 he was elected to the Académie des Sciences; notable in this field are his memoirs: on the communication of motion (1682; 2nd ed., 1699: applying to “small vortices” or atomic motions the law of universal attraction); on the different apparent sizes of the sun and moon at the horizon and at the meridian (1693, in controversy with the Cartesian H. Régis); and on light, colors, and fire (letter to the Academy, 4 Apr. 1699). He collaborated with De l’Hôpital on differential calculus and also concerned himself with entomology. Ascetical works include: *Conversation chrétienne* (1675); *Petites méditations chrétiennes* (1677); *Petites méditations pour se disposer à l’humilité et à la Pénitence* (1677); *Traité de l’infini créé*; and *Traité de la Confession et de la Communion* (posthumous, 1769, with a reprint of the memoir on the possibility of transubstantiation [1682]). His death, after a long illness, was preceded by a lively BERGER, ELIE (v.). He maintained philosophically significant correspondence with the Cartesian Father André, with the mathematician J. J. Dottus (d’Ortous) de Mairan (1678–1771) on Spinozism, and with Leibniz on the foundations of metaphysics and on pre-established harmony. A polished and disciplined writer, he enjoyed immense fame in his own time and throughout the 18th–19th centuries as the “Christian Plato”; he remains one of the classics of French and European philosophy.
Despite the fact that his principal works were placed on the Index, he had fervent followers even among the Oratorians, such as Fathers Thomassin, B. Lamy, Roche, Leleve, and Fedé, his contemporaries; continuators and apologists like Father André, the Abbé de Lamion, and C. Leport de la Morinière; and imitators such as the Italian Father Giovenale (Trento 1686) and the so-called egocentrists or solipsists of the 18th century (A. Collier).
The doctrine of the *Recherche de la vérité* derives from two theoretical-historical problems: that of the Oratorians themselves (Gibieuf, 1630; Martin, 1671) for a return to Augustinianism and its motifs of interiority, voluntarism, and Platonic ideology; and that of post-Cartesian occasionalism (Geulincx [v.], Clauberg, and others), arising from the analysis of the relations between spirit and matter, soul and body, and resolved by the postulates of occasional causes and pre-established harmony. Malebranche, abhorring the pantheistic conclusions to which Spinoza had arrived from occasionalism, sought to fuse the two currents in their common Platonic inspiration. His original inspiration consists in attributing to the human will, as free choice and love of the true and the good, the necessary consent for the formulation of judgments and reasoning by the intellect, which is purely contemplative and passive—that is, a part of the powers of the agent intellect. This consent, substituted for or identified with theoretical assent, overcomes the skepticism of judgmental assent and error, whose sources are of a practical nature; but it is directed only toward intellectual evidence. Hence sensibles, images, and pure extension (*étendue en soi*) are but ideas accepted by man as he does those of science. The world of bodies exists only as a probable, inductive hypothesis; to it man attributes the extension he intuits, just as he attributes to other souls his own spiritual life. The belief in a direct relation of the soul to the spatial world, in which the causes of sensible impressions would be localized, is erroneous: sensible qualities and even the duration of phenomena are passions of the subject, which are extended by judgment to supposed bodies but do not derive from them nor are they substantial forms. The world of the senses certainly alludes to the world of bodies; but it is true or false according to the clear and distinct ideas one has of it or according to the error of confused consent (I. 1). The same may be said of the imagination in relation to the phenomena of the nervous system: to which it corresponds in time, intention, and the natural and divided laws it represents, but is superior to and independent of them in productive activity. Malebranche devotes a careful study to this in his analysis of psychological, pathological, and literary forms, with particular criticism of the excesses of imagination in Seneca and Montaigne (I. 11).
Senses and images are therefore not effects of corporeal reality but modifications of thought, which is the only essential form of spirit. Thought has as its objects ideas, which are always clear and distinct in themselves but are not produced by the soul; rather, they are present to it as intuited in God. Meanwhile, the soul has within itself and from itself only an immediate self-consciousness of its own volitive and arbitrary life, akin to the consciousness of the infinite as a negative idea. The ideas have been produced by God as universal and archetypal forms, sharing in His essence (but not in His substance); He presents to the soul, which depends on Him, the individual cases of these ideas in relation to the inclinations of the will. Man therefore sees all things in God and knows God in His ideas, which for man are objective (for God alone, subjective). Even the extension in which bodies are localized is an idea of God, the intelligible *étendue*; indeed, all ideas of corporeal things are His modifications and subordinate to it (I. 111).
This theory was contested by critics as akin to Spinozism; but more criticism was directed, beginning with Arnauld, against the objective idealism and the pragmatic motive assigned to the distinction between true and false ideas. The method to which Malebranche arrives is indeed founded (I. VI) on the exercise of the power of attention as the link between will and knowledge, and on the development of the idea of the infinite as having its positive form in God and in extension; the sciences best corresponding to these requirements being mathematics, logic is therefore identified with mathematics. The initial formulas are those of the Cartesian method itself (evidence, clarity and distinctness, progress from the simple to the complex, complete analysis), but their development is of a practical nature. The Aristotelian method, examined in the *De coelo* (VI, 2, 5), is declared devoid of clarity and distinctness; yet it is certain that the renunciation of both classical and modern realism opens the way to subjective, Berkeleyan idealism.
Books I, II, IV and V of the *Recherche* are devoted to a profound analysis of spiritual inclinations or movements (toward the good: curiosity; toward being and well-being: desire to know; toward one’s fellow men: friendship) and of the passions or bonds between the spirit and sensible objects, whence love and error arise.
To this psychology the *Traité de morale* adds another characteristic doctrine of M.: the general occasional cause that unites volitional acts to ideas (as reciprocal occasional causes) and renders them sensible is Christ as the universal mediator between God and man. Christ is Reason, which gives life an immutable order and renders the search for a natural order superfluous. The love of order, or charity, in its free, habitual and dominant form, makes up for the insufficiency of free will and constitutes virtue. To man’s love of order, or benevolence, is added God’s univocal love, Grace; yet Grace leaves the spirit free. The system of duties toward God, society and oneself follows these principles, but is inspired by all three divine Persons.
M.’s metaphysics develops the proof of God’s existence as suggested by the idea of the infinite in our perception; yet this idea does not represent God in Himself, whose substance is superior and transcendent to every idea.
The proofs of the existence of bodies are by revelation: from pain, from the synthesis of intellectual vision and feeling, from the order of ideas in intelligible space. Their creation by the infinitely perfect Being is, however, not necessary, and therefore not demonstrable. Creation is free, like every act of God, and represents the full unfolding of His being. Ideas are His infinite attributes, and intelligible extension is not only an idea but contains the possibility of creating infinitely many possible worlds (v. LEIBNIZ). Divine action toward the world of bodies is providential in character, and thus concerns itself with the infinitely great as well as the infinitely small, with order and harmony as well as the combinations of events. The same divine Providence regulates the union of soul and body according to the system of occasional causes, which subordinates the body to the soul in the state of Grace, and governs the world of souls.
Religion teaches how to overcome sin, or the inversion of the relationship between body and soul. Providence grants the Church, as the guardian of religion and promoter of the love of God, infallibility. Yet the faith it nurtures is subject to Reason incarnate in Christ: ecclesiastical reason is reason humbled before God. Acts of worship, as expressions of man’s desires for Grace (actual love), are the particular occasional cause of that same divine Grace, determining God’s providential acts toward men and the efficacy of the Sacraments (habitual love). The love of God must be disinterested and directed to Him for His own sake. It saves the soul at death, reducing death to a mere separation from the body and the return of the will to the beatitude of ideal truth in God; whereas its condemnation would be to be subjected to the material world. It would still exist in God, but as a negation of itself, like the demons and Hell, which are the negation of His light. These paradoxical formulas explain the opposition encountered by M. far more than the naive contemplative tendencies of his Platonism.
SANTINO CARAMELLA